Issue link: http://viewer.e-digitaledition.com/i/994625
E ARLY INTRODUCTION OF EGGS BOOSTS INFANT BLOOD CONCENTR ATIONS OF SE VER AL KE Y INDICATORS OF BR AIN DE VELOPMENT, A RECENT STUDY IN ECUADOR FOUND. THE RESULTS COULD HAVE IMPLICATIONS FOR INFANT NUTRITION IN BOTH THE DE VELOPING AND DE VELOPED WORLDS. May Enhance Infant Brain Development, Researchers Find BY THOMAS CROCKER EGGS EGGS PACK A strikingly e¨ cient nutritional punch relative to their size. For example, they are rich in protein, vitamins A and B12, fatty acids, and choline, a vitamin B-related nutrient. Lora Iannotti, PhD, Associate Dean for Public Hea lth and Associate Professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, led a group of researchers who studied the nutritional e¨ cacy of introducing eggs to Ecuadorian infants early during complementar y feeding, when other foods begin to augment breast milk. The research- ers, whose resu lt s were published in Pediatrics, ran- domly assigned 163 infants a g e s 6 – 9 m o n t h s t o a n inter vention group, in which the children received one egg per day for six months, or a control group that did not receive eggs. In the intervention cohort, eggs had a signifi cant e† ect on growth — the prevalence of stunting decreased by 47 per- cent and underweight by 74 percent. That was eye-opening. "The average e† ect size across other comple- mentary feeding interventions around the world was only 0.39, compared with our e† ect size of 0.63," says Iannotti, the study's lead author. "That surprised us. Our e† ect size was almost 70 percent bigger." BODY AND MIND Iannotti and her team did not hypothesize that eggs would have a benefi cial e† ect only on growth — they also speculated that eggs would signifi cantly enhance infants' levels of choline and other brain development biomarkers. 1 4